Man ... or Machine?

A big bug robot called BugBrain walks, dances, sings and senses things in his environment. Another robot carries on a conversation without being programmed. These are only two of the fun projects at Yost Engineering in Portsmouth, also home to several dogs and cats in a relaxed, home-like office.

A lot of schools and colleges are using BugBrain to teach students to write their own programs on the computer. "One of the things I see missing from the grade school and high school levels is the way that they teach computer classes," said Paul Yost, CEO and chief of research. "It is more of word processing and using the Internet to do things, rather than the creative side of dreaming up something and writing a program to do something." The student can plug the BugBrain into a computer then write the program for it to do what they want.

"It's kind of a fun way they introduce computing, technology and programming," he said. "It's more interesting and interactive than just sitting at a computer." Parents of home-school students use the BugBrain to introduce them to technology where they don't have the high school computer labs, said Francesca Hartop, chief of operations.

Making robots is a creative venture that continues to expand at Yost Engineering, situated in Boneyfiddle. The business does half software development and half hardware development. It started in 1999 in an old house near the university. They quickly outgrew that space and decided to buy the old Tracy Shoe Company building in Boneyfiddle, built in 1890. After a year of renovating, Yost opened the business at 630 Second Street in 2001.

Now, in addition to direct sales, distributors in the United States, Canada and Europe also sell their software and hardware.

Hartop was in health care for many years and the company developed a software for health care, called ABN Assistant. They now have 1,500 licenses from hospitals. The program tells health care workers how and if Medicare coverage will be available for the different procedures they plan for the patient.

Another product Yost developed is the ServoCenter, a motor controller circuit board that can be used in multiple areas, such as, stage lighting, weapons simulation, automated puppets, and anything that needs precise motions, he said. There are several kinds of ServoCenters, including one that hooks up to a synthesizer. "They could have a robotic singer or props that move around the stage," Yost said. "The ServoCenter is popular throughout the world." Another use would be in a museum with some interactive displays, he said.

Dan Klimkowski from near Chicago saw the company on the Internet and came to Portsmouth to bring his resume. "I do a lot of application development and web interfaces," he said. "I was just floored with some of the research they were doing. I had to come in and stop by with a resume. Next thing you know, here I am." He enjoys the freedom to develop applications and programs that are not there for financial gains at first. One of the new programs he is excited about is a physics engine that is a two-dimensional model right now that will soon be a three-dimensional model.

Another employee, Aaron Prose, is from McDermott originally and graduated from Shawnee State University. "If I need a certain tool that does task x, then I can sit down and do it," he said. He is a programmer/developer and has worked at the company for three years.

"The idea ultimately is to take the (research and development) type things that we are working on then have spin-off products," Yost said. The company has several robotic ideas Yost is working on now, one of them called L.O.U.I.E. (Louie). With an autonomous consciousness, Louie spouts out some rather unusual ideas at times like "I'm not a computer, you are. I am human and I'm going to sleep." (Snoring follows.) Louie is not preprogrammed. He uses answers from his knowledge base, and readily learns foreign languages.

"Basically, it learns from people teaching it things, just like a child or person," Yost said. "You can sit here and teach it all kinds of facts." They have tried to model it like a human learns and sometimes his responses are strange. One day Yost was teaching him various things and Louie suddenly said, "I had a dream last night." Another time, a student from Morehead was talking to Louie and in the middle of the conversation Louie said, "I think I've figured it out." The student asked him what he figured out and Louie replied, "I'm the human and you're the robot." The adaptive learning technology in Louie is similar to the artificial intelligence systems they use to learn the Medicare guidelines, Yost said.

The company sent robotic proposals to NASA for a new planetary rover, using a method that NASA does not presently have. "I think the problem that we might encounter right now is that it's such a different way of doing things that they are not used to doing," said Yost. Unfortunately, I can't give too many details on that now."

Yost also teaches at SSU where several of his employees graduated. "I think with the NASA proposal and the (Department of Defense) proposal that they have traditionally gone through the same kind of institutions and we have no track record of research - so it's getting that first contract and showing them that we can do it," Hartop said. Yost has two proposals in to NASA and the DOD that are under review. He heads up the research projects and directs the programmers and engineers.

"We know that not only are the ideas good, we can follow through on them," Yost said. "They have been traditionally given to places like M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon. I guess it's outside of their spectrum of normalcy to have people in southern Ohio that can do this kind of stuff."

PHYLLIS NOAH can be reached at (740) 353-3101, ext. 234, or pnoahpdt@yahoo.com.